Football does not afford its followers many choices. Most fans have no option but to support their club team. Blood lines, local pressures and family traditions force us into picking a team before we are wise enough to avoid our fate. Even those of us who are free from parental and geographical pressures end up making silly, juvenile decisions based on shirt colours, seeing a match on TV or liking a player's name. Youth is truly wasted on the young when it comes to choosing a football club.

The process is even simpler for national teams: you support the place of your birth and so does everyone else. The restrictive nature of football fandom should not bind us too tightly. It's OK to break free from those confines every four years and lend our cheers to another county. So who will have your support in Brazil?

Everyone uses a different method when picking a second team. The glory hunters will choose Argentina, Germany and Spain; the stylists will adopt the bright colours of Brazil and Holland; the tacticians will be partial to Mexico's back-three and Chile's improvisation; the masochists will go for Australia; and the globalists might opt for Japan, Iran or Cameroon.

Bosnia-Herzegovina could be the ideal second team for this World Cup. They are the only debutant nation at this tournament, which makes them fairly distinctive from the start. The last World Cup to welcome only one new country was also held in Brazil, back in 1950, when a group of confident Englishmen based on the Copacabana beach lost to a team of semi-professionals from the US.

Bosnia-Herzegovina have a few recognisable players: Edin Dzeko, who could be a decent outside bet for the Golden Boot; Miralem Pjanic, who dictates the play for Roma and his country; and Asmir Begovic, the goalscoring goalkeeper. They scored 30 goals in their 10 qualifiers, so should prove fairly entertaining, and they will expect to make it out of a group that contains Argentina, Nigeria and Iran.

Their optimistic manager, Safet Susic, plays a loose 4-1-3-2 formation that is set up to score as many goals as possible. "When you have players such as these, it would be unfair to the fans, to the sport itself, not to unleash all our talent," he says, sounding like the kind of man you want in charge of your second team.

Beyond the simple joys of seeing a new team play excicting football, there is a more profound reason for supporting Bosnia-Herzegovina. This a young country whose players are building history upon the ashes of a destroyed and divided land. They won't progress as far as Brazil, complete as many passes as Spain or offer the outsider appeal of Ghana, but they are giving the world something new.